When I read the original post, I was thinking the silly game allowed him to build an AN designed monitoring station with no long range scanner. Which is a pretty useless, and I think they could be available without the scanner tech.

Which makes the game scumbag due to tricking him into building something useless.

I felt the same^^^Fan boys get all worked up over nothing..........lol

Just for the record: "meme" is still a _very_ controversial concept among the type of academic professionals for whom the topic is most 'close to home:' anthropologists. There are literally entire sub-schools of thought that specialize in studying memes and focus almost exclusively on them. And then on the other end of the continuum there are people who would argue that any attempt to use a genetic concept and apply it to culture is absurd.

I have always found the concept quite intriguiging and tend to think there is some kind of merit in it.

But I'm increasingly thinking that what we are really dealing with are the emergent units that arise through the interaction of universal semiotes and specific cultural/ideosyncratic symbolic interpretations. The original meme concept doesn't capture that complication so well . . . but alas, I am digressing quite far from the topic of the OP so I will SU now . . .

Just haven't been on here for a few months, and this happened to be the first DW thread I looked at